My late father had a weird hobby in the 1980s. He spent his evenings in an isolated room, talking on a radio to people from all over the world. He was an amateur ham radio operator, and he picked up all kinds of shortwave stations from the Soviet Union and different places. He was in on the very first developments in packet radio, which was a forerunner of packets of information transmitted over the Internet today.

I never got into ham radio, no matter how many antennae I helped Dad install on the roof to wreak havoc with the neighbors’ television reception and phone lines. But later, I got into public radio at WCBN-FM and KAOS-FM in the 1990s.

Climbing on the roof with Dad was fun as an adolescent, but I have even more adventurous memories of my public-radio days, none of which I can share with you out of a sense of common decency and legal liability. My memoirs from the pirate station in Arcata, California in the early 2000s are even less printable, and that’s one of the everlasting joys of my life.

These days, you don’t need a radio transmitter to talk to people all over the world; you just need the Internet. I loved public and pirate radio, but no one in Europe or Australia or Japan or South America talked to you while you did it. 1990s college radio was local. The Internet is global.

My favorite Internet-based communications group is one I affectionately call my story hour group. They have read stories in live, voice transmission from across the country and globe for more than a decade now. Many of those stories inspired my own poems and fiction.

I got a microphone recently, which only seems amazing to readers who have followed me since 2013 when I sold everything I owned. A few of you understand how lean that year was, and how lucky I am to even be alive to post utterly irresponsible blogs in the middle of the night to you right now. Thank you if you bought some comic books and art that year! I wouldn’t be here without you.

Anyway, to celebrate “Talk Like a Pirate Day” on Tuesday, September 19, I read Hang My Body on the Pier for a group that connects via the Internet to read stories to each other, and it was fun. Reading out loud for a solid hour is more challenging than you’d think, and I was thankful my new mic had a mute switch for when I needed to clear my throat, cough, or gulp another beer.

Okay. I might have gulped beer a few times in their poor little ears. But that is only fitting for “Talk Like a Pirate Day”, and may they all suffer the wrath of a thousand hells if they squandered a single ration of rum that night. Sink and burn me.

I enjoy reading my stories aloud, so I recorded my two most recent short stories and submitted them to Audible to release as audio books. They are currently in the quality review process, because Audible has specific requirements about decibel levels for peaks and room noise. We will see if I got them right the first time, or if I need to try again.

Part 2: Kickstart My Heart.

Don’t tell UK-based artist Joe Shenton, but I backed his recent Kickstarter with ulterior motives. His artwork is the kind of thing I wish I could do. Since discovering his work on Reddit, I could not get this thought out of my head: “He is the guy who should be illustrating my science-fiction series, not me.”

I could spend the rest of my life trying to draw space stuff and aquatic animals the way he does, and not even get close. His drawing arrived last Saturday and is now framed on my wall. He asked about themes or subjects his contributors like, and I told him, “I like space, pirates, and octopuses.” He sent me this glorious 6×8 ink drawing.

Just between you and me and the world-wide web, I’m pondering how to make it worth his while to draw telepathic space octopuses, calico cats, cybernetic electric eels, armored space lizards, and psychedelic rock-and-roll visions from the year 2029.